MesaZona > Table of Contents : Here's The Menu. Enjoy: January 2017

31 January 2017

John Giles Answers The Question: Leader? or Cheerleader? in #SOTC17

This year's State-Of-The-City speech staged at the Mesa Convention Center for guests ready-willing-and-able to pay the ticket-price of $50 took place this morning with the usual rah-rah fanfare for his speech to a choir of faithful brethren, friends-and-family, city hall employees, East Valley area politicians, business associates and city employees who paid their homage to the mayor during his third annual address to the assembled faithful.
Last year it all started with his running onto the stage from the back-of-the-room re-living no doubt his track career as a college athlete. . .

This year he answered a question on a blog post here on January 22, 2017

"Can John Giles lead or is he just a cheerleader on the sidelines?"

This year he opens as a leader of the MHS marching band - waving a baton in the air in front of his battalion of musical instrument players who no doubt blasted loud enough to startle and wake-up the gathered faithful.
Your MesaZona did not attend and could not force himself to watch the entire extravaganza staged in front of a polite and low-key audience in the usual format of a prepared speech in between snippets of this and snippets of that about the city we all call home.
One segment was about harnessing social media to get more feedback that will be rolled-out in the next couple of months.

Who can forget the highlight from last year seen in the image to the left?
Though who wrote that script remains a mystery, appearing with a costumed character named "Sparky", the mascot for ASU, for what became the key cornerstone of his campaign for NextMesa and somehow didn't work out ...
We all wish the mayor - and all the people who live here in Mesa - the best outcomes for all the challenges and opportunities on the road ahead in 2017

If you'd like see the entire #SOTC17 live stream, go here >>
https://www.facebook.com/MesaMayorsOffice/videos/10158577272345725/

Joi Ito Co-Author of Whiplash: How To Survive Our Faster Future

College didn't work for him

Streamed live 1 hour ago

Joichi "Joi" Ito has been recognized for his work as an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and internet freedom.
As director of the MIT Media Lab, he is currently exploring how radical new approaches to science and technology can transform society in substantial and positive ways.

About the Book:
"The future," as the author William Gibson once noted, "is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." Whiplash is a postcard from that future.

The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, just as billions of strangers around the world are suddenly just one click or tweet or post away from each other. When these two revolutions joined, an explosive force was unleashed that is transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The logic of a faster future oversets the received wisdom of the past, and the people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently.

In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period. From strategically embracing risks rather than mitigating them (or preferring "risk over safety") to drawing inspiration and innovative ideas from your existing networks (or supporting "pull over push"), this dynamic blueprint can help you rethink your approach to all facets of your organization.

Filled with incredible case studies and leading-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.

Category
- News & Politics
License
- Standard YouTube License

Draining The Swamp or Quicksand Snarls Trump | Watergate Deja Vu??

Watergate Veterans: Just Like Nixon, Donald Trump Appears to Think He is Above The Law

Published on Jan 31, 2017

http://democracynow.org - On Monday night, after Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates over her refusal to defend Trump’s Muslim ban, many commentators compared the incident to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when then-Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy resigned after President Richard Nixon ordered Richardson to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. For more, we speak with two women who played key roles during the Nixon years. Elizabeth Holtzman is a former U.S. congresswoman from New York who served on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon. Jill Wine-Banks was an assistant Watergate special prosecutor and the first woman to serve as U.S. Army general counsel.

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Re// HISTORIC PRESERVATION 411: 3 Linked Posts

Don't know about anyone else, but when your MesaZona blogger hears or reads the word "preservation" there's an olfactory memory of strong smells of formaldehyde, biological specimens crammed into glass jars, dusty dark places and things stuck between yellowed pages all dried-up and discolored with no hint of their lives or glories. So let's strike that word from the lexicon used on this blog and insert the word REGENERATION in its place.

Back on 13 January there's a featured post: The Economics of Historic Preservation: Lessons Learned . Please take the time to scroll down and take a look ...

The City of Mesa to its credit has an Historic Preservation Board that's doing some good things . . . but why the big push now for historic preservation ten years after the stunning new International Design Award-winning Mesa Arts Center was built in 2005, with it taking until 2014 for a residential design award-winning apartment complex to get built that was the first new housing in downtown in 30 years. In that interim timespan many historic homes and properties got some overdue attention and historic districts were organized and approved after years going through the approval process to keep what is unique.

With reference to that here are two more resource articles recently published:
1. The Case Against Historic Preservation
2. Historic Preservation - Treating the Symptom Instead of the Cause

Both are written by Andrew Rice
Andrew Price has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2013 and is a founding member of the organization. Andrew is a software developer by day and an urbanist by night. He is passionate about traditional urbanism – he believes in fine-grained, highly walkable places that are built for people. He grew up in Australia and now lives in the United States with his wife. Andrew is a regular contributor on Strong Towns and runs his own blog, andrewalexanderprice.com. You can find many of his photographs throughout the Strong Towns website. Andrew’s motivation to be involved in Strong Towns and urbanism is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.
Readers can get the gist of his article Historic Preservation - Treating the Symptom Instead of the Cause published that was published today 31 Jan 2017 in his first and last paragraphs:

Introduction: Does this all sound way too familiar here in Mesa?

"There are two kinds of historic preservation - the kind archaeologists care about where you are preserving the artifacts of an earlier civilization, and the kind the city council is interested in at the local level. We'll be discussing the latter here. (You can read about my earlier thoughts on historic preservation in The Case Against Historical Districts.)

The primary motivation of historic preservation is to prevent something from being replaced by something worse. "Worse" is subjective, and depending on the context, could mean replacing a beautiful ornate building with a glass tower, replacing a simple two story brick building with a parking lot, or the modernization of an entire city district.

Hollowing Out

Cities and neighborhoods are not always in a state of continuous growth. When a city grows and the number of residents and businesses in the city increases, the number of housing units and floorspace for offices, retail, industry, and other uses must increase to accommodate the additional demand.
When the population decreases, it contracts. There are many ways the contraction can play out, but it could look something like this: property owners can’t find enough tenants, so the upper floors are abandoned. Eventually, rents fall so low that that the owner is collecting less revenue than what it costs to do basic maintenance on the building, so they want to get rid of the building. To stop losing money, the owner either abandons the building or sells it. If the building is sold, the new owner might think think that it is worth more to them as a parking lot than a vacant building not bringing in any money. If the building is abandoned, it deteriorates beyond repair and is eventually bulldozed. Regardless of how this scenario plays out, the net result is that it shrinks the supply of unneeded floor space in the city. This can either happen at the neighborhood level (everyone flees a former bustling neighborhood to the newly built suburbs) or even at the city level.

Conclusion:
"I believe there is a time and a place for historic preservation. When a particular site plays a role in history or is such a recognizable landmark, and a developer wants to tear it down or abandon it, then we have a justifiable case for preserving it. But, in most cases I believe that historic preservation is a pill for treating a symptom rather than curing the cause. We have a shortage of high quality urban places not just in the United States, but globally, and I think modernity (which includes suburbanization, modern city planning, and modern architecture) plays a huge role in this shortage. Because there is a shortage, we so desperately hold on to the places that remain. But instead, I think we should focus our efforts on tackling the underlying problem. If we were building more lovable, fine-grain, human-scale places to replace those that were lost or redeveloped, there would be very little reason to focus so much effort on historic preservation."

Link to entire article Strongtowns.org

A recent adaptive re-use for The Alhambra Hotel, on the National Register of Historic Places in an adaptive re-use to a residence hall for Benedictine University students in The New Urban Downtown Mesa

Grand Opening of An Historic Property Regenerated For Student Housing

The site since 1894 for The Alhambra Hotel on the National Register of Historic Places at 43 S MacDonald Street will be enjoying a new life as the Alhambra Residence Hall for approximately 60 Benedictine University students in total when interior work is finished at the back of the buildings, following the 25 or more accommodations ready-to-move-into and furnished now.
According to a post on Twitter there will be a Grand Opening on Tue 07 Feb a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for a Grand Opening Reception starting at 1:00 pm followed by a tour of the building and an outdoor patio area.
For more information: jawilson@ben.edu

Just the other day finishing touches were getting done on the installation of lighting at the front of the building

30 January 2017

Origins and Destinations of the World’s Migrants

May 17, 2016
Origins and Destinations of the World’s Migrants
1990-2015
Blogger's Note: This map needs to get up-dated to show the last two years of migration caused by U.S. wars in Africa and the Middle East

In 2015, 46,630,000 people living in the United States were born in other countries. Migration works two ways - in the same year comparable numbers of people born in the U.S. migrated out from their birth origin to destinations in other parts of the world.
Source: Pew Global
The figures in this interactive feature refer to the total number (or cumulative “stocks”) of migrants living around the world as of 1990, 2000, 2010 or 2015 rather than to the annual rate of migration (or current “flows”) in a given year.
Source: United Nations Population Division.

Since migrants have both an origin and a destination, international migrants can be viewed from two directions – as an emigrant (leaving an origin country) or as an immigrant (entering a destination country).
According to the United Nations Population Division, an international migrant is someone who has been living for one year or longer in a country other than the one in which he or she was born.
This means that many foreign workers and international students are counted as migrants. Additionally, the UN considers refugees and, in some cases, their descendants (such as Palestinians born in refugee camps outside of the Palestinian territories) to be international migrants.
For the purposes of this interactive feature, estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in various countries also are included in the total counts.
On the other hand, tourists, foreign-aid workers, temporary workers employed abroad for less than a year and overseas military personnel typically are not counted as migrants.

The Startup Idea Matrix

From Eric Stromberg

Source: The Mission + Media

meet a lot of people who are interested in starting a company, but haven’t found an idea they are excited to work on for the next 5 to 10 years.

I generally think it is smart to have patience in finding an idea that pulls you in: a market or opportunity you can’t imagine not pursuing. Patience in the near-term will save you a lot of time in the long-term.

However, I’ve found one way to find this idea is to gain broad exposure to different markets until a specific opportunity and mission stands out to you. Of course that is where the real work begins: auditing the industry, talking to customers, learning about its history, and understanding the pain points to validate the idea.

To help with the brainstorming part of the journey, I’ve put together a matrix that outlines various consumer markets as well as tactics a company can take to bring a unique product to the market. Credit to Chris Dixon who showed me this format a few years ago.

This matrix is for consumer opportunities, but if people like it I’ll make one for B2B opportunities. The format could even be applied to one specific market like media to reveal a wider range of opportunities.

I’ve filled in some of the cells with startups that fit the themes. This is by no means exhaustive (and a company could fit in more than one category), but including existing companies helps ground the ideas in reality and makes it easier to draw connections.

To view the matrix, you can follow this link.

Think of this less as a map and more as a starting point for creativity. It probably won’t give you the next billion dollar idea, but might spark a line of thinking that brings you to one.

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